The Last Deep Breath

4

Didn’t tell her that night, or the next, or the one after that, though she kept asking. It was a game to her. She’d smile and come in with her nails, scratching and tickling him, start wrestling with him across the bed, and then ask him again.

Okay, so she was serious. Wanted to know so she could put it to use somehow. Put him to use. Maybe send him after her agent or some film critic who’d slapped her silly in the trades. He couldn’t figure out what kind of hold she expected to get on him. Sexual, emotional, financial, or were they just going to be good pals? It didn’t much matter. Somehow he wound up with all her luggage in the trunk and back seat of his car, heading toward L.A.

They floated into East Hollywood about noon. He’d never seen the Pacific and wanted to drive that long winding road with hairpin turns that might land you on the cliffs below. He’d seen it in a hundred movies, mostly black amp; whites, usually in the rain, rising up and up until a tire blows out and the bad guy takes a header onto the reefs below.

But when he mentioned it to her she said, “What road?”

That taught him something right there. He was coming at it all wrong. She knew the reality, he knew the dream. Grey wondered if there would be any middle ground to find.

He pulled up in front of an apartment complex with a large courtyard. A couple of cats were fighting in one of the pomegranate trees. There was a swimming pool with a couple of bikini-clad girls and some bulky guys catching rays, slathered with baby oil and letting their mustaches and spandex briefs do their talking for them.

Kendra told him to sit tight. He parked and hung his legs out the window and smoked a cigarette. Could you really rent an apartment on the spur like this? No credit or background checks? Maybe she knew the manager. At a rest stop a couple hundred miles back, while she used the ladies room, he’d rifled her bags and found a couple ounces of coke. He figured she could always trade it to help keep her off the map. Life ran differently out here in L.A., but a lot of the ground rules were the same as in New York.

He watched her walk with the manager up a staircase to a corner apartment with a nice balcony. Ten minutes later she came down the steps, trotted along the walkway, leaned in the window and kissed him.

“Come see our new place,” she said.

That made his stomach tighten, seeing how easily she got things accomplished. You had to be careful. He carried the bags to the apartment while the mustaches gave him the stink eye. It looked a hell of a lot better than the place he’d had in the Village. There was a lot more sunlight coming through too. He dropped the bags and she threw herself across the bed. He thought she wanted him so he crawled across the mattress on his knees only to find her out cold.

That Hollywood sign, he figured he’d go find it. Took him a couple of hours of prowling the town without asking directions before he found the right mountain, looked up and saw the word there hanging in the sky. He got out and stood at the side of the road, enormous shadows already starting to angle and stretch toward him. Hollywood.